I am no Astrophotographer, but I am an experienced It guy - I can say a few things to hopefully help. First, using a hub should not be an issue for any devices, however it needs to be a quality hub and preferably powered which power draw is common issue if multiple devices need power and USB does have fairly low limits. So cheap amazon unpowered hubs will give you issues on anything that has power demand or high speed data transfer. So spend the $50 on a quality high speed hub with power. The hub you have is powered so you should be good, my next move would be to question your cables..
Next, cables are almost always the issued with devices not being recognized or transfers having hicups or drops. The generic cables rarely support spec for high speed transfer and a 10MP camera is sendinf a LOT of data real-time. I would get quality cables for the camera to hub and hub to PC. Distance is a major issues, USB is only good for 3ft, between 3-6ft you have degradation, good cables can shield this, over 6ft will commonly fail under load. 10ft and you are lucky if the device eill even be detected as connected to your system. Rule of thumb is go with the shortest possible cable.
now on the PC side it can depend, side-by-side ports may be tied to a single motherboard controller, which then yes - they could step on one another. Newer or more expensive laptops usually have independent controllers. You can check this in device manager by having both ports occupied, then sort device manager by connection (instead of type up on the view menu) and drill down and they will either tie to the sam USB controller or show separate.
USB is very susceptible to other processes on the PC running and taking priority causing frame drops, older PCs will struggle more with larger data sets. A way to do a quick test of this is if you have two USB sticks copy a large video file between them, or capture video to each stick and see if you get waves or blips in the file transfer box details (the green graph windows pops up when transferring files) if that isn’t a fairly steady average FPS you could have USB bandwidth challenges and that may be fixable by finding what else is impacting the system during those blips. One of the worst offending apps is an Antivirus program, another can be software installed by your laptop manufacturer, junk they load on to monitor your system.
this is wave 1 troublshooting - based on what you come back with we can narrow down some more causes and fixes.
Edited by Kring, 19 January 2021 - 02:37 PM.
